Who is the Ruminator?
The Ruminator is David B. Thompson, Christian, husband, father, grandfather, engineer, musician, photographer, programmer, motorcyclist, wannabe web-designer, and total geek. If you want to see his curriculum vita, then it is on his professional website as his resume. Go ahead and read it — be bored. His professional life is reported in his resume. He lives and works in Douglas County, Nevada — Minden specifically. However, his work seems to come from where ever, with projects in Texas, Nevada, and nationally.
He has an B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in civil engineering from what was the University of Missouri — Rolla (and is now Missouri University of Science and Technology), where he specialized in hydraulics and hydrology. He worked in private industry, federal government, in academia (at Texas Tech University) — teaching in the civil engineering department, and now has returned to private practice.
David began working with computers in 1978 when he was introduced to the WATFIV interpreter. He wrote FORTRAN programs to solve various engineering problems and continued writing FORTRAN until he taught himself Pascal (actually, Turbo Pascal) in 1984, when he bought his first IBM PC clone. That first personal computer was a Columbia PC (now long gone) based on an Intel 8088 CPU with a (then) fast (5MHz) 8087 FPU. Turbo Pascal was followed by the C programming language and 8088 assembler to accomplish certain tasks.
In 1990, he discovered LaTeX, a user-friendly macro-set written by Leslie Lamport based on the TeX typesetting language developed by Don Knuth. Donald Knuth is one of David's heroes. After learning the capabilities of this system, he abandoned Microsoft Word and uses LaTeX exclusively for preparing technical documents. He still uses Microsoft Word when required to prepare documents when that format is required. But, he does this with substantial disdain.
In 1994 he discovered linux and the *nix world. He abandoned Microsoft Windows for all possible tasks. When he learned that the solid teTeX system was included with most linux distro's, he continued to write all of his text with LaTeX. He learned he could do system administration of linux systems and became familiar with the RedHat distribution, after trying several other distro's.
In 1995 he discovered the World Wide Web (oftentimes referred to as the World Wide Wait for good reasons). He established his first web pages sometime shortly after that (both the date and original pages are lost), when he brought shelob (used to be http://shelob.ce.ttu.edu, but no longer) into existence and on-line with the Apache server. Since that time, he has had a continual web presence.
Early in 2001 he discovered weblogs, first reading Molly's Book of Days, a site that chronicled the life and times of a young woman (Book of Days is also long gone). He was inspired to start his own weblog and Random Ruminations was born. Random Ruminations has existed since shortly after the infamous 9/11.
David was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2002 after dealing with it his entire adult life. He experienced a significant remission in June 2005 when a nexus of events occurred. There was a moment of epiphany and the broken parts began to merge into the whole that is to be David. Without doubt, more hard times will come and there will be challenges, but life changed substantially on that June afternoon.
Sometimes David is technologically-challenged. Long after Apple's new operating system, OS X, was released, he became aware (although it was widely publicized) that OS X is unix-based. He knew Apple produced quality hardware. Their machines demand a premium price as a result. He bought a PowerBook G4 in December 2003 and explored the Macintosh operating system. After a couple of months of experience, he switched, permanently, and purchased a desktop PowerMac in September 2004. After three years of service, he retired the PowerBook G4 and purchased a MacBook Pro. He is impressed with the quality of the machines and the software available for them. They offer strong advantages for researchers because of the underlying unix operating system and the amount of open-source software available.
During 2004 and 2005, David experimented with the Tablet PC environment. Unfortunately, it's only available with Windows. The utility of the Tablet PC environment lies in the divorce of the the computer from the keyboard. Writing is a more natural interface than the keyboard. Writing is also acceptable in more venues. However, David terminated the experiment when maintaining multiple computers became burdensome. Although his interest in tablet-computers remains strong, the implementation has not quite reached the point where he will abandon his Macs for a tablet.
Last updated: 7 September 2009.
